The Fall Guy (2024)

You fall down, you get right back up. How far would you go for the one that you love? Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) works as the double for famous action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor Johnson) who always says he does his own stunts. However, he is severely injured during a stunt gone wrong and he abandons his career and his girlfriend camerawoman Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). 18 months later, Colt, now a valet for a small Mexican restaurant, is contacted by Tom’s film producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham). She informs him that Jody is directing her first film, sci-fi epic Metalstorm, and wants him to work on the production in Sydney Australia. After arriving on set, Colt learns that Jody never requested him and is still angry about their breakup. Gail reveals that Tom has disappeared after getting involved with drugs: she wants Colt to find him before his absence causes the film’s cancellation. Not wanting Jody’s directorial debut ruined, Colt visits Tom’s hotel room and a nightclub, where he gets into fights. In the hotel room, he finds a dead body in a bathtub full of ice. When Colt returns with the police, he finds the body has disappeared. Meanwhile, as production of Metalstorm continues, Colt and Jody begin to rekindle their relationship until Gail abruptly informs him that he has to go back to the US. Instead, he continues looking for Tom by tracking down his PA Alma Milan (Stephanie Hsu) and they are both attacked by people looking for a phone belonging to Tom in Alma’s possession. Colt defeats them after an extended chase through Sydney involving a rubbish truck. He and his friend Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), the stunt coordinator on Metalstorm, unlock the phone at Tom’s apartment. They discover a video of an intoxicated Tom accidentally killing his previous stuntman Henry. The henchmen attack Colt and Dan, destroying the phone with shotgun pellets. Dan escapes, but Colt is captured and brought face-to-face with Tom, who has been hiding out on a yacht on Gail’s instructions. He reveals that Gail is framing Colt for the murder using deepfake technology to replace Tom’s face with Colt’s on the incriminating video. Tom also reveals that Colt and Henry’s ‘accidents’ were orchestrated by himself. Henry’s body is discovered and the doctored video is released on news media, while Gail tries to convince Jody that he is guilty. Colt escapes and is presumed dead after a boat chase, though he swims to safety … I’m the director. You’re a stunt guy. We need to keep it super profesh. If last year was the Summer of Barbenheimer, that compound of mutually assured box office billionairedom, the films’ respective supporting stars are the whole show of this decade’s Romancing the Stone, at least its descendant by way of Howard Hawks and screwball. Much has been written concerncing memed-about Gosling’s super-ironic commentary on modern masculinity, a career pivot which makes him – in the words of a Guardian writer’s recent article – the most important Hollywood star, so we’ll go with it. Dry supercilious wit being a thing Blunt does well, they’re a great pairing in a story that both sends up Hollywood and mines its great romantic inclinations. Adapted very loosely by Drew Pearce from the beloved Eighties TV show created by Glen A. Larson which starred Lee Majors, Heather Thomas and Jo Ann Pflug/Markie Post not to mention a Rounded-Line Wideside truck (and an outdoor bathtub). Stuntman turned director David Leitch cut his teeth on great action movies and is responsible for helming John Wick among others and this is not just the most recent ode to the craft (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Gosling’s own turn in Drive, Burt Reynolds was Hooper, then there’s The Stunt Man, to name the most outstanding in this sub-genre) which is due to be honoured at the Academy Awards one of these years, it’s a clever metatextual behind-the-scenes examination of the business, the deceptive nature of stars’ PR, and the pitiless nature of the production machine when you’re not flavour of the month (or fit to work). It’s all of that but mostly it’s a crash-bang-wallop action movie with ever more spectacular sequences. This is a precision-tooled mainstream hit with something for everyone, a genuinely warm and funny knowing adventure-satire with finely tuned star performances. Unlike the show, when Majors got to croon The Unknown Stuntman (covered here by Blake Shelton in a great soundtrack featuring AC/DC and Kiss), Gosling hasn’t got a theme song – this year’s showbiz highlight has got to be his Oscars rendition of I’m Just Ken, but he doesn’t need another tune, that’s already part of his star text so everyone just incorporates it and tucks it away into what they know about supposedly the most important Hollywood star, the self-deprecating caring sharing modern action man. And, since this is about stuntmen, big up to Logan Holladay for all those rolls. Huzzah! It ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward

Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

One decision – one small mistake – can change everything. Federal police detective Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) attempts to coerce further information about an international money laundering scheme from a company employee, Alice Russell (Anna Torv) but she refuses to give him any further information when he approaches her on the school run. The next day, she embarks on a corporate team-building hiking retreat to the rainforest in the (fictitious) Giralang Ranges of Victoria with four other company employees, her boss Jill Bailey (Deborra-Lee Furness), childhood friend Lauren (Robin McLeavy) and sisters Brianna aka Bree (Lucy Ansell) and Bethany aka Beth (Sisi Stringer). Three days later, Falk receives an incomprehensible phonecall from Alice which quickly drops out, only to later be informed by fellow agent Carmen Cooper (Jacqueline McKenzie) that Alice’s hiking partners had returned from their trip injured and Alice is missing. Suspecting something has happened to her due to her being a whistle blower, Falk and Cooper quickly join the search to find her. In flashbacks, it is revealed that Falk’s mother Jenny (Ash Ricardo) also disappeared from the same area during a hiking trip with him (Archie Thomson) and his father Erik (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor). After tirelessly searching for her for days, the pair finally found her injured and malnourished but she ultimately died shortly afterwards in hospital. Alice’s co-workers reveal that during the first night of the trip, Jill’s husband Daniel (Richard Roxburgh) who was responsible for the laundering scheme, met up with the group and led Alice away from them. Afterwards, Alice became frantic and desperate to leave the trip early even after Daniel has left. Brianna, who’s been hospitalised due to a bite from a funnel web spider, reveals that she’d misread the map in her hungover state and caused the group to become lost. While attempting to follow the river back home, the map falls into the water and Lauren is injured while attempting to retrieve it. Bethany later admits to Falk that she previously had a drug problem, which had resulted her in serving jail time due to her neighbours reporting her for selling her sister’s belongings for drug money, which resulted in Alice not trusting her. The group continues on and Jill finds out that Alice has seemingly been intentionally leading the group in the wrong direction and becomes furious. The next day, the group discovers an abandoned cabin and decide to stay there for the night despite Alice’s protests. Later on, they discover the gravesite of a dog, causing Alice to insist they may be on the hunting grounds of an infamous serial killer who lured his female victims using his dog, but the group brushes her fear off as her trying to persuade them to leave the cabin … Your mind starts to play tricks on you out there. You get really paranoid. That talented Australian novelist Jane Harper wrote one of the best novels of the past decade The Dry and following its successful adaptation starring the great Eric Bana a followup was destined to be on the cards – the 2017 novel Force of Nature came first and this adaptation was made in 2022 in a very different and non-dry environment. Perhaps it should be called The Damp. Everyone is soaking. Moving deep into the undergrowth of the rainforest acts as a kind of metaphor for a story that has many tangled strands – Aaron’s own psyche and past, his association with whistleblower Alice, her school-age daughter Margot’s (Ingrid Torelli) alleged bullying of her colleague Lauren’s daughter Rebecca (Matilda May Pawsey), the financial misdeeds at Alice’s company boss and the crimes of a four decades-old serial killer in the very area Alice is missing. Knitting these together into a coherent screen story seems almost impossible very quickly particularly when the four remaining women’s recollections resemble those of Rashomon – overlapping, contradictory and untruthful. Linking the search for Alice with Aaron’s retracing his steps into his own history with a trip taken alongside his parents seems a trope too far – and one presumes it forms a link to the notorious serial killer – yet clever construction, transitions and characterisation through the twists and turns of a mystery plot ultimately keep everything from tipping too far into the realm of coincidence or predictability. The local police sergeant Vince King (Kenneth Radley) wonders why Aaron is really out here, a long way from finance fraudsters. Paired with the brusque Carmen, Aaron’s forced introspection means that the flashbacks conjoining his mother’s predicament with Alice’s situation force them – or squeeze them – into the same narrative loop. The undercurrent of female relationships – at work, mothering, friendship and colleagues – with their basis in bullying is never far from the surface. And could they be any worse prepared for this trek? Can we just keep this between the five of us please? And, the quid pro quo into which Alice has been forced by the feds for what she was prepared to do for her daughter is the moral quandary that literally turns this in to a guilt trip writ large, adding melodrama to an already busy screenplay. Everyone has reason to dislike and even motive to kill Alice but we find ourselves asking why sisters are working at the same company and why Alice and Lauren are friends. It seems unlikely. Perhaps this structure dilutes the impact of the first film with the multiple storylines and one unresolved plot issue but Bana is somehow the still centre of the complications, a restless soul with a desk job whose past knowledge of the territory makes it more navigable. Even with a background in tragedy however this doesn’t have the emotional resonance it strives for and the mood is broken by issues of plotting placing it at some distance from a famous Aussie film about a disappearance, Picnic at Hanging Rock. It helps that this is lined out with some of the country’s best (and best known) actors with Torv now an international name thanks to TV’s The Newsreader, while Furness, a scene-stealing Roxburgh and an underused McKenzie are a pleasingly familiar ensemble, driven by a powerful score from Peter Raeburn. Beautifully shot in a number of Victoria parklands by Andrew Commis, this is written and directed by Robert Connolly, reprising his role from the first film. At least out there Nature holds us all to account

Samira’s Dream (2022)

Aka Ndoto Ya Samira. I’d want to leave my dad’s house one day. The fishing village of Nungwi, north Zanzibar. Producer and director Nino Tropiano’s voiceover explains that he has received funding from an Irish organisation to explore female education in Africa. He finds a group of high school girls under the shade of a tree and over a period of time (and the with assistance of a translator) he decides to follow one of the, Samira. He traces Samira’s progress once he secures the agreement of her family and teachers. So what is the origin of Swahili? Over a period of seven years Tropiano catches up with Samira, sometimes after one year, sometimes after 15 months, even three years. He observes the changes in her circumstances, her home, class attendance and interruption, house moves, her development, her maturity. I don’t have any freedom to do what I want. The film’s midpoint, more or less, sees Samira explain everything that is wrong in her life to her teacher. The pivotal issue is the terrible loss of her mother after which her father separated her from her mother’s family in Pemba and moved them to Nungwi where he remarried again twice and has more children whom she has been obliged to care for. Everything in her life including her education has hinged on this event and its impact makes her cry – a terrifically moving moment. Her friend Shamsa claims to be ‘under a magic spell’ but she is controlled by her boyfriend who bans the cameraman from the vicinity. She does what he tells her. She’s not even married! At the exams they’re not speaking; at the graduation there’s a chasm between them. Tension builds at home with her stepmother who insists that she go with her on a trip to the mainland where they stay in a mud hut in the countryside. Then the high school exam results await. She has barely scraped a pass. She’ll be doing this the hard way. Then, a surprising event: a marriage proposal. Despite not being presented as an overt study of girls in Islamic communities or a critique of the religion, this is an immersive account of a society governed by and for men, something the girls question more than once. That extends to the content of the curriculum – we were particularly amused by a kind of parable about theft concerning a duck and a man with feathers in his hair. The sometimes jarring gaps in the storytelling (presumably due to production and funding circumstances) are camouflaged by Samira’s own charm and the occasional intervening voiceover by the filmmaker. It is rare that we feel a subject deserves more time onscreen. However over the years a complete portrait is achieved as this charismatic young woman comes into her own. At least one of my two dreams came true

The Idea of You (2024)

What if I could be the sort of person who goes camping by myself? Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Forty-year old Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is a gallery owner and divorcee who plans a solo camping trip while her ex-husband Daniel (Reid Scott) takes their daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) and her friends to Coachella. When he is called away on work assignment to Huston, she is left to accompany them. Daniel has arranged for a meet and greet with famous boy band August Moon, despite Izzy now dismissing them as so seventh grade. While waiting in the VIP area, Solène enters what she believes is a bathroom, only to discover that it is August Moon member Hayes Campbell’s (Nicholas Galitzine) trailer. The two are attracted to each other, although Solène, who is sixteen years older than Hayes, is uncomfortable. During August Moon’s performance, Hayes appears to change the show’s setlist, dedicating a song to her. Solène attends her birthday party where is fed up with prospective men her own age. Shortly after the festival, Hayes shows up unannounced at Solène’s gallery, interested in purchasing art. After he buys every piece at the gallery, Solène takes him to a friend’s warehouse studio, where they discuss life and art. After thinking that a restaurant would invite too much attention, the two go to Solène’s house to eat. They share a kiss, but Solène rebuffs him. Hayes leaves his watch behind, then, finding Solène’s phone number on the gallery invoice, texts her to join him in New York at the Essex Hotel. With Izzy away at summer camp, Solène meets him at his hotel where they have sex. Hayes persuades her to travel with him on August Moon’s European tour. Solène wishes to keep their relationship private and does not tell Izzy or anyone else. As the band takes a break at a villa in the south of France, Solène becomes uncomfortable about her age in relation to the other women travelling with them. Bandmate Olly (Raymond Cham Jr) tells her that Hayes’s dedicating a song to her is a tactic they use to impress women and that Hayes has previously pursued relationships with older women including a 35-year old Swedish film star he embarrassed. Solène feels misled and disillusioned and abruptly returns to Los Angeles … Is this your first time getting Mooned? Adapted by director Michael Showalter and co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt from actress Robinne Lee’s bestseller, this sees Hathaway getting into her groove in a seriously romantic drama. The ironic trigger for everything that now happens in her life is her ex’s need to prioritise himself and his business – just as his affair ended their marriage. When she meets a guy 16 years her junior and he reveals his own fear they find a kind of balance. He says: I think that’s my greatest fear in life – that I’m a joke. She counters with: What will people say? Galitzine at first seems like an overwhelmingly gallant white knight and Hathaway positively glows: being adored suits her. Watching her shrug off the mid-life nonsense purveyed by divorced men who insist on talking about themselves all the time is infectious – she is not in crisis. Naturally, once she goes on the road with the band Hayes’ alley cat past comes back to haunt him in a way that hers haunts her decision-making and the wheels come off when she can’t take the heat. The publicity leads her husband to gloat, I’m sure we can all agree that a relationship with a 24-year old pop star would be crazy on so many levels. Yet her daughter argues, Why would you break up with a talented kind feminist? And, for a while, it works, until the Moonfans get their way on social media. Tracy (Annie Mumolo) makes for a great BFF when she comforts Solène, People hate happy women. And that of course is the point. Women are supposed to suffer! Their cheating exes hate them except when they do what they’re told! Their kids don’t let them have a life if they’re not at the centre of everything! Other women hate them! Watching this lovely woman change her opinion of herself and her possibilities in the reflection of how a new guy sees her is wonderful. How the story beats are worked out might not be surprising but to say this is pleasurable and crowd-pleasing is an understatement: it’s a deeply sexy film. The leads are more than persuasive as the well met age-difference match, the scenario a delirium of groupiedom wish fulfilment (She’s with the boy band!!) and it’s all beautifully made with due diligence concerning the social media pile-on which is all too realistic as is the message that love at any age is a trial. A splendid soundtrack peppered with everyone from Fiona Apple to St Vincent as well as the songs from August Moon and Hayes as a singer-songwriter in his own right (with a score by Siddartha Khosla) makes this a total delight. Directed by Michael Showalter. We’re two people with trust issues who need to open up a little. What’s the worst that can happen?

Challengers (2024)

You’ve never seen her, man. She’s in another league. 2019: married tennis power couple former player Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) and currently injured star Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have a young daughter Lily (AJ Lister) who likes to stay in hotels. Under Tashi’s coaching, Art has become a top pro. He is one US Open title away from a Career Grand Slam but he is struggling to regain his form after an injury. Hoping to return him to form, Tashi enters Art as a wild card in a Challenger event in New Rochelle, New York to boost his confidence by beating lower-level opponents. His former best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend is now an unknown player living out of his car, scraping by on the winnings from the lower circuit and also enters the New Rochelle event. 2006: high schoolers and childhood best friends Patrick and Art win the junior doubles title at the US Open. Afterwards, they watch Tashi a highly lauded young tennis prospect make mince meat of the opposition on court. Then they meet her at a party later that night. Usually their attractions are separate but Tashi is the first person to whom Patrick and Art are both attracted. The three make out in a motel room but stop short of having sex. With the two boys playing each other the next day, Tashi says she will give her phone number to whichever of them wins. Patrick wins the match and later signals to Art that he had sex with Tashi by placing the ball in the neck of the racket prior to serving – a tic of Art’s. Tashi and Art go on to play college tennis at Stanford University, while Patrick turns professional and begins a long distance relationship with Tashi. A jealous Art questions Tashi about whether Patrick loves her, and Patrick, recognising Art’s jealously, playfully reassures him of his and Tashi’s connection. Patrick and Tashi fight when she gives him unsolicited tennis advice and he says he views her as a peer, not his coach. In the next match which Art watches without Patrick, Tashi suffers a severe knee injury. Patrick returns to comfort Tashi but she demands he leave, with Art taking her side. Art aids Tashi in her recovery but she is unsuccessful in resuming her tennis career. I want you to join my team because I want to win. A few years later Tashi reconnects with Art and becomes his coach and the two begin a romantic relationship. He reveals that he and Patrick have not talked since Tashi’s injury. In 2011, Tashi and Art are now engaged and Art’s career is on the up. Tashi and Patrick run into each other at the Atlanta Open and have a one night stand, which Art secretly notices. 2019: Starting at opposite ends of the seeding, Art and Patrick advance through the brackets at New Rochelle until they find themselves facing each other in the tournament’s final match. In a sauna the day before the match, Patrick attempts to reconnect with Art but Art rejects Patrick by saying his career is over and he, Art, will be remembered. Patrick secretly asks Tashi to be his coach and lead him to one last winning season, sensing she is unhappy with Art and that Art is tired of playing but she rejects him … Which one is which? Take three highly charismatic young actors, place them in competition with each other sexually and professionally, complicate things with a love triangle and the monotony and sacrifice of life as sportsmen and women and you have the ingredients for a cracking drama. Director Luca Guadagnino returns with a tennis story – a surprising fact particularly given that there haven’t been any good ones but the screenplay from Justin Kuritzkes is multi-faceted. Not just a sports film but a romance, a thriller and a portrait of generalised anxiety erupting from having to sustain a career, creating monetising opportunities from every win, enduring pain, dealing with catastrophic injury, burnout, a friendship contained within the rise and fall narrative that all sportspeople experience over time and driven characters playing at marriage. Using the New Rochelle Challenger event as a framing device intensifies the pressures of the relationship past and present – we see where they are now and how they got there with the catalysing event an almost-threesome that prefigures everything else in their destiny. And as Tashi explains, Tennis is a relationship. What an impressive cast. Faist is the dazzling actor who was by far the best thing about Spielberg’s West Side Story remake – awards should have come his way but the film fell foul of COVID lockdown release schedules just as this one was delayed from Fall 2023 due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Here he’s the walking wounded and he plays tender and vulnerable so well. O’Connor is the talented Brit who has created so many great performances and powers his way through this with a life in freefall and a smirking swagger, never fully out of love with Tashi. Zendaya is finally being allowed to act nearer her age (27 at time of release) and is so famous she’s currently on the covers of both UK and US Vogue, such is her pull for advertisers and the youth audience, a combination of Euphoria and Spider-Man fans with a monster sci-fi epic under her belt following Dune 2. Watching the guys watch her on court at the 2006 US Open and later at a party, open-mouthed and lustful like heat-seeking missiles, is highly amusing and sets up the relationship’s eventual complexities with her at the fulcrum, literally calling the shots. Aren’t you everybody’s type? It also sets in motion the director’s familiar focus – young people and their romantic travails – although we know the starting point is the end point, or thereabouts, which is a little like watching Titanic and knowing the outcome but now we get to invest in the characters as they encounter each other 13 years later with everything that has gone on since that first fateful encounter. You typically fall apart in the second round. As the guys get reacquainted with their game and Tashi is turned off Art because his game is off and she lives through him, Patrick sees his chance to upset the applecart, pointing up the performative aspect of all their public lives. Thus the scene is set for Round Two in their lives, rivalries intact. It’s about winning. And I do. A lot. For a sports movie love triangle this fun and sexy we have to go back in time to 1977 and Semi-Tough with Burt and Kris and Jill. That was smart and screwball-y too but set in the world of football. How are you going to look at me if I still can’t beat Patrick Zweig? This is tense and exhilarating and wonderfully played by a cast that is exceptionally well matched and hot for each other. Love all? Not quite. But this is a smash, with a zippy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Who wouldn’t love you? MM#4545

Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)(TVM)

There’s war and there’s war. 1990s: Renowned war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) is recalling her youthful relationship with novelist Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen). 1936, Key West, Florida. She meets him by chance in a bar and back at his house run by his wife Pauline Pfeiffer (Molly Parker) the two’s undeniable attraction is noted. My husband always says kill enough animals and you won’t kill yourself. The two writers encounter each other a year later in Spain where both are covering the Civil War, staying in the same hotel on the same floor. Initially, Gellhorn resists romantic advances made by Hemingway but during a bombing raid the two find themselves trapped alone in the same room and are overcome by lust as dust from the conflagration covers their bodies. They become lovers and stay in Spain until 1939. Hemingway collaborates with Joris Ivens (Lars Ulrich) to make the film The Spanish Earth. In 1940 Hemingway divorces Pauline so that he and Gellhorn can be married. He credits her with having inspired him to write the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and dedicates it to her. Over time however Gellhorn becomes more prominent in her own right, leading to some career jealousies between them. Gellhorn leaves Hemingway to go to Finland to cover the Winter War by herself. When she returns to the Lookout Farm in Havana the maid has quit and she tells him the place looks like a Tijuana whorehouse. Hemingway tells her that he has divorced Pauline. The two marry and travel together to China to cover the bombings by Japan. In China, they interview Chiang Kai Shek (Larry Tse) and his wife (Joan Chen) who Gelhorn can’t best when she expresses her horror after visiting an opium den where she has spotted a little girl. Chiang Kai shek is fighting the Chinese Communists and Japanese invaders. Hemingway and Gellhorn secretly visit Zhou Enlai (Anthony Brandon Wong) the revolutionary content to play both ends against the middle until his time comes. Gellhorn covers D-Day in Normandy. She reports on the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps and his so horrified she runs out of them … There’s nothing to writing. Sit at your typewriter and bleed. Bluster and confidence, the devastation of war, lust and fine writing, a universe of division and conflict and conscience, all are called upon as the affair and marriage of two of the twentieth century’s best writers bear witness to unfolding history. Beautifully shot by Rogier Stoffers using different camera effects and archive montages to insert the characters into both colorised and monochrome footage, there is an uneven tone to this biopic as well as shifts in performance particularly by Owen who doesn’t quite capture the self-aggrandising charisma of Hemingway but certainly asserts his sexist boorish aspect. There is a certain comedy to the introduction of the famous characters, who take time to establish themselves in the narrative and sometimes play minor roles, there to augment and embellish the self-mythologising author who is hard to pin down here (Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris does this with caustic aplomb). Surrounded by an entourage of sycophants and hangers on, only John Dos Passos (David Strathairn) appears to question Hemingway’s macho posturing. When Hemingway admits he’s taken her Collier’s contract, Martha repeats what the man he calls the second best American writer has said of Hemingway and he hits her across the face: we know the marriage must be over. But not quite. There’s still a final act of war and humiliation. They have persuasively created a sexual and co-habiting relationship that is sometimes hard to watch when they exchange harsh words – but then wind up laughing at the good of it all. Until they fight again and it becomes ever more vicious. They’ll still be reading me long after you’ve been eaten by worms. Hemingway’s demise following his marriage to Mary Welsh (Parker Posey), who’s written as a celeb-hunting nicompoop, which may not be quite fair, is dramatic and swift in storytelling time (those presumably causative head injuries in the later aeroplane crashes are not covered albeit the car crash here with Welsh probably contributed to it). It’s a rich tapestry and while not successful overall, with an occasional (if forgivable) lurch into domestic melodrama, there are moments of genuine humour, black comedy and horror. For instance when Kai Shek dumps his dentures into a teacup and his verbose spider spouse does the talking and makes an unwilling Gellhorn take a gift. That’s history. The only thing that really interests me is people. Their lives. Their daily lives. And there are instances in war zones when Gellhorn scoops up children as their parents bleed to death and Hemingway, the father of sons by his previous wives, scoffs yet paradoxically admires her humanity. When Gellhorn walks into Dachau but then says Auschwitz was unbelievably worse and just takes off running we sense her disbelief. Kidman is quite splendid for much of the film. This is an amazingly comprehensive and visually immersive portrait of a man and a woman who were at the heart of a decade of world-changing events whose impact we still live with today. However their characters are almost too big to contain (and the gargantuan 2021 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick docu-series Hemingway has far more biographical information), literally covering too much ground with the prism of a domestic battle perhaps too slight for such an enormous focus. Necessarily episodic, the protagonists’ differences are sketched out schematically so this goes just a little way toward explaining why both are legends and Gellhorn fought so hard for her individuation. As she says here, she’s more than just a footnote to Hemingway. Consider this film restitution. At 155 minutes, this was premiered at Cannes but broadcast as a mini-series by HBO. Written by Jerry Stahl & Barbara Turner and directed by Philip Kaufman. We were good in war. And where there was no war we made our own. The battlefield we couldn’t survive was domestic life

Pretty Woman Was Released 23rd March 1990!

Neophyte screenwriter J.D. Lawton’s script 3000 was a dark tale of prostitution that was transformed in a fairytale makeover with director Garry Marshall. Somehow, as Hollywood Boulevard’s happy hooker, Julia Roberts did an Audrey Hepburn star-making turn and charmed audiences everywhere, rendering this the highest grossing romcom of all time. Richard Gere as the corporate raider who hires the smartass streetwalker as an escort for the week embellished his own repertoire with a comic nous previously underexploited. Naturally, they change each other for the better and only a fool couldn’t guess what happens next when two of the world’s most beautiful spend the night together in a penthouse suite. It’s all done with a ravishing lightness of touch. Were sex and shopping ever such an attractive combination?

Love in the Afternoon (1957)

Aka Ariane. I always tell you what I’m doing, but you never tell me what you’re doing. Paris. Young cello student Ariane Chavasse (Audrey Hepburn) eavesdrops on a conversation between her father, Claude Chavasse (Maurice Chevalier) a widowed private detective who specializes in tracking unfaithful spouses, and his client, Monsieur X (John McGiver). After Claude gives his client proof of his wife’s daily trysts with American business magnate Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) in Room 14 at the Ritz Hotel, Monsieur X announces he will shoot Flannagan later that evening. Claude is nonchalant, regretting only the business he will lose, since Flannagan is a well-known international playboy with a long history of casual affairs. When Ariane cannot get the Ritz to put her through to Flannagan on the phone, and the police decline to intervene until after a crime has been committed, she decides to warn him herself, and leaves for the hotel. When Monsieur X breaks into Flannagan’s hotel suite, he finds Flannagan with Ariane – not his wife (Lise Bourdin), carefully making her escape on an outside ledge. Flannagan is intrigued by the mysterious girl, who refuses to give him any information about herself, even her name. He starts guessing her name from the initial A on her handbag, and when she declines to tell him he resorts to calling her thin girl. She has no romantic history but pretends to be a femme fatale to interest him, and soon falls in love with the considerably older man. She agrees to meet him the next afternoon, not mentioning that she has orchestral practice in the evenings. She arrives with mixed feelings but spends the evening while waiting for him to leave for the airport. Ariane’s father, who has tried unsuccessfully to protect her from knowing about the tawdry domestic surveillance details in his files, notices her change of mood but has no idea that it proceeds from one of his cases. A year later, Flannagan returns to Paris and the Ritz. Ariane, who has kept track of Flannagan’s womanising exploits through the news media, meets him again when she sees him at an opera while surveying the crowd from a balcony. She puts herself in his path in the lobby, and they start seeing each other again … He who loves and runs away, lives to love another day. The first of twelve collaborations between Billy Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, this sprightly adaptation of Claude Anet’s 1920 novel Ariane, jeune fille russe is in fact the fourth screen version of the story, the second of which (1932) had a screenplay co-written by Wilder and the third which supposedly inspired this was made in Germany in 1931 by Paul Czinner. The attraction for Wilder is clearly in the potential for making a film along the lines of his hero Ernst Lubitsch with his fabled ‘touch’ and aside from the judicious use of eavesdropping (a suggestive trope Lubitsch loved), key to this is the casting. For Wilder, Hepburn was kissed by the angels and it was their second film following Sabrina. She shines here as the music student with ideas beyond those of the older men around her, curiosity stoked by those amorous files in her father’s office. According to her biographer Alexander Walker, there were alterations to the screenplay, so “Wilder had a heroine who behaved with the serene composure of a self-confident schoolgirl. It would work, he was sure. Truant and pert, Audrey bubbles along, sticking her oval chin out as if to invite love, the putting up her guard just in time.” Cooper remains an epic iteration of masculinity but wasn’t Wilder’s first choice – that would have been Cary Grant, who never agreed to appear in any of his productions. He comes to Paris every year and I always know because my business improves noticeably. Cooper, however was affable company for a location shoot in a city Wilder loved that had given him respite and a career after fleeing Nazi Germany. It was their second collaboration too because in 1938 Cooper had appeared for Lubitsch as another womaniser in France in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife on which Wilder had done some writing and that had also marked his first collaboration with previous writing partner and producer Charles Brackett. Now he tailored Cooper’s role more specifically to how he appeared twenty years later. There was a problem, though. “The day I cast Cooper, he got old,” Wilder told Charlotte Chandler. For Chevalier this gave him his first non-singing screen role in a decade. It restored his popularity following his conduct during the war – like many in the French film industry, he agreed to work in tandem with the occupying Germans. He wasn’t especially popular on set however, and Wilder left him out of the cocktails he hosted each evening (just as he had done with Humphrey Bogart on Sabrina).  In Paris, people make love – well, perhaps not better, but certainly more often. They do it any time, any place. On the left bank, on the right bank, and in between! They do it by day, and they do it by night. The butcher, the baker, and the friendly undertaker. They do it in motion, they do it sitting absolutely still. Poodles do it. Tourists do it. Generals do it. Once in a while even existentialists do it. There is young love, and old love. Married love, and illicit love.  It was a tricky shoot not merely because of unseasonable weather and mosquitoes but also because of the street demonstrations and violence in Paris following the Russian invasion of Hungary and the Suez crisis, forcing Wilder to speed up filming and organise evacuation plans if the worst occurred. The amoral tale is softened somewhat by the use of music and songs, almost as melodrama (in the original meaning) including Charles Trenet’s L’ame Des Poètes, Henri Betti’s C’est si bon and Fascination, a motif which is hummed throughout the film by Ariane in a score supervised by Franz Waxman and played by those obliging gypsies who also serve as a Greek chorus, discreetly disappearing when the action hots up. Cooper’s advancing age (56) and haggard appearance (he would have a full face lift two years later) made this stylish and witty exploration of sex a hard sell in the US market where the straightforward philandering didn’t go down well at a time when Lolita had just been published. However the content is mitigated by that lightness of touch that disguises discomfort while Hepburn performs beautifully as the naive daughter opposite Chevalier as her concerned father and of course Cooper who is taken in by her assumed identity in a story of double standards and hypocrisy. And a coda was added to the American production to make things right. You could fly in the twins from Stockholm. Hepburn remarked that the enterprise might have made more sense had the men’s roles been swapped. She discarded the possibility of playing Gigi on the big screen in part because Chevalier was in the cast – that twinkle in his eye didn’t seem paternal at all. She was drinking too much during production and presumed guilt led to a bout of the anorexia that plagued her. She’s a very peculiar girl. Not my type at all. As is the custom with Hepburn’s roles, there’s a fairy tale transformation here but it’s really that of Flannagan’s Don Juan – albeit there’s a fun reference to Cinderella when Ariane mislays her shoe in his hotel room. You know who I am, Mr. Flannagan, I’m the girl in the afternoon. Hepburn was outfitted by Hubert de Givenchy (and an uncredited Jay A. Morley) but her hairdo was altered from her previous urchin look in Funny Face with a centre parting introduced to a soft pageboy bob by Grazia di Rossi. She retained the look off the set, which caused quite the fashion brouhaha, and the Yorkie, Mr. Famous, which absent real life husband Mel Ferrer had bought to keep her company and wound up having a co-starring role here. The tiny creature gets smacked so much! For all its issues and complications, this is an irresistible, seductive, tart, wistfully romantic and sophisticated delight with an absurdly moving ending (plus that coda to emphasise a morally correct conclusion). And isn’t the Saul Bass poster ingenious? We did have a good time, didn’t we?

Leap Year (2010)

A day for desperate women. Successful Boston real estate stager Anna Brady (Amy Adams) is frustrated that her long term boyfriend cardiologist Jeremy Sloane (Adam Scott) still has not proposed to her after four years. She decides to travel from to Dublin to propose to him on February 29,  Leap Day, while he is attending a conference. Anna plans to invoke an Irish tradition, when a woman may propose to a man on leap day. During the flight, a storm diverts the plane to Cardiff  in Wales. Anna hires a boat to take her west across the Irish Sea to Cork. The severity of the storm results in her being put ashore at a small seaside village of Dingle. Anna requests surly Irish innkeeper Declan O’Callaghan (Matthew Goode) to give her a lift to Dublin. At first he refuses, but as his tavern is threatened with foreclosure, he agrees to drive her for 500 euros. Along the way, he mocks her belief in a leap year tradition of women proposing to men. A herd of cows blocks the road. Anna steps in cow dung while attempting to move the animals and tries to clean her shoes while leaning on Declan’s car, which causes it to roll downhill into a stream. Continuing on foot, Anna flags down a van with three travellers who offer her a lift. Ignoring Declan’s warning, Anna hands them her luggage. They drive off without her. Anna and Declan make their way on foot to a roadside pub, where they find the thieves going through Anna’s luggage. Declan fights them and retrieves Anna’s bag. While waiting for a train in Tipperary, they ask each other what they would grab if their homes were on fire and they had only 60 seconds to flee. They lose track of time and miss the train. They are forced to stay at a B&B  where they pretend to be married so that their conservative hosts will allow them to stay. During dinner, when the other couples kiss to show their love for each other, Anna and Declan are forced to kiss as well  … Why don’t you try and stop trying to control everything in the known universe? The screenplay by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont unearths a previously unknown Oirish custom called ‘Bachelor’s Day’ throwing together two mismatched romantic protagonists into a tiny car (of a marque last seen in Ireland maybe forty years ago) and hurtling them around the country in a screwball road movie that hits more posts than goals in terms of plausibility or indeed verisimilitude. A cast of redoubtable local performers including Pat Laffan, Alan Devlin, Ian McElhinney and Dominique McElligott do their best with mindless if inoffensive comedy (if you’re not Irish) and the scenery as shot by Newton Thomas Sigel is curiously muddy throughout. Made variously in Counties Wicklow, Dublin, Mayo Galway and Kildare, filming took place in and around the Aran Islands (Caragh’s Inn in Kilmurvey on Inishmore) and Dun Aonghasa Cliffs, Connemara, Temple Bar, Georgian Dublin, the Rock of Dunamase in County Laois, Enniskerry and Glendalough National Park in Wicklow, Carton House Hotel in County Kildare and Olaf Street in Waterford City. A romcom that never rises above the sum of its parts but certainly provides a lens into the tourist view of the island. It’s so bad it’s enjoyable and has become a major cult. This eventually bounces along with a fun soundtrack of popular songs in a score by Randy Edelman. Directed by Anand Tucker. You just surprised me. You keep doing that

The March Hare (1956)

There’s always something special about Ascot. Royal Ascot race meet. Sir Charles Hare (Terence Morgan) is an Irish baronet with a taste for betting who loses his ancestral home Wolfshill in County Kildare and its racing stables after someone fixes a race that Hare has gambled on. Forced to sell his estate, he decides to stay on when the new American owner McGwire’s (Macdonald Parke) lovely daughter Pat (Peggy Cummins) mistakes him for a groom. Playing along with her mistake, romance develops between the two. Meanwhile, Hare’s aunt Lady Anne (Martita Hunt) and his friend Col Keene (Wilfrid Hyde-White), save one foal from the sale and rear it with the help of drunken leprechaun horse whisperer Lazy Mangan (Cyril Cusack) who is invariably drunk but has strong control over the horse by invoking the power of the fairies and introduced him to the Fairy Queen on arrival at the estate. Two years later Hare names the colt The March Hare and decides to impress the absent Pat (on a Swiss sojourn) by turning him into a prize racehorse. At a racecourse where Peggy discovers Sir Charles’s true identity The March Hare only manages to run after Mangan calms him using a specific fairy word. Hare and Pat go dancing on a date in London. After Mangan falls ill, he becomes teetotal, which restores his health but it means he can no longer remember the fairy word. Derby Day arrives and their usual jockey is nowhere to be seen because betting maestro Hardwicke (Ivan Samson) has received the shock of his life when he learns from his minion Fisher (Charles Hawtrey) that five huge bets have come in simultaneously and if The March Hare win his company stands to lose half a million. Hare needs to track down Mangan … Every horse has to have his own special word. Adapted from T.H. Bird’s novel Gamblers Sometimes Win by Gordon Wellesley and Allan MacKinnon with additional dialogue by Paul Vincent Carroll, this combination of society drawing room comedy, sports story, romcom and animal tale is exceptionally well structured with the midpoint allowing for a reset as all the screenplay manuals advise: The March Hare wins, Pat returns from Switzerland and Norway and rejects Charles’ marriage proposal and Mangan gets sick. Everything starts again, on a slightly different hoofing. The stakes are definitely raised in this droll outing which feasts on the cast which numbers several familiar character players including Derrick De Marney as Captain Marlow, Maureen Delany as Bridget the housekeeper, Stringer Davis as the doctor tending to Mangan when he apparently loses the fairy word for the little horse that could and for fans of horse racing the voice of the sport himself (at least in 1955) Raymond Glendenning. Morgan is of course the handsome devil in disguise (at least at the start) with the ever youthful Cummins as the smart as a whip girl he falls for (the second time they were paired a few years after Always a Bride); while Cusack milks his role for all its worth with the rather curious choice of a Northern Irish accent for the back of Kildare. There’s a hilarious scene when Hyde-White approaches an insurance broker (Reginald Beckwith) insisting that The March Hare races with the help of the fairies – he’s literally taken away. As Hunt remarks in one of the few Empire-era jokes, An Irish company would have understood perfectly! There’s lilting diddly-aye music courtesy of tenor Joseph McNally arranged by composer Philip Green which definitely gives a jaunt to the lively proceedings. Gloriously shot in CinemaScope by Jack Hildyard with to die for views of Dublin and London and rural Ireland, County Mayo and County Wicklow standing in for Kildare) as well as great action at Ascot and other race meetings, highly idealised visions now, sadly. Other locations include Dublin Airport, Epsom Downs and Gerrards Cross, Bucks. According to the mighty reelstreets.com the mansion used for Wolfshill is Littleton Park House at Shepperton Studios in Littleton, Surrey and it can also be seen in other productions including Allez France, The Earth Dies Screaming, Make Mine a Million, Cockleshell Heroes and The Great St. Trinian’s Train Robbery. The pub where Lady Anne and Mangan are found half cut is apparently The Goat, Upper Halliford Road, Upper Halliford, Shepperton TW17 that also features in The House on Marsh Road, Bond of Fear and Appointment in London. This is a delightfully comic equestrian story, gorgeously mounted with a sprightly ensemble who appear to be having as much fun as the viewer. And the colt is a fine creature. Directed by George More O’Ferrall. I’ve forgotten more about horses than you’ll ever know